EDITOR: Erwin Marquit (physics, Univ. of Minnesota) BOOK REVIEW EDITORS: Eric R. Jackson (history, Northern Kentucky Univ.) and Doris Grieser Marquit (literature, women’s studies) ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Gerald M. Erickson (classical studies, Univ. of Minnesota) Gerald Horne (African American studies, Univ. of Houston) Eric R. Jackson (history, Northern Kentucky Univ.) Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (history, Howard Univ.) April Ane Knutson (French literature, Univ. of Minnesota) Doris Grieser Marquit (literature, women’s studies) David S. Pena (philosophy, Miami Dade College) Michael Parenti (political science) Epifanio San Juan Jr. (cultural studies, Philippines Cultural Studies Center, Storrs, CT) José A. Soler (labor education, Univ. of Massachusetts, Dartmouth) Ethel Tobach (comparative psychology, City Univ. of New York) Prasad Venugopal (physics, Univ. of Detroit Mercy) VOL. 19, NO. 4 (OCTOBER 2006) Sent to press January 2, 2008 Copyright © Marxist Educational Press All rights reserved Cover design by Prockat VOLUME 19, NUMBER 4 October 2006 NST: NATURE, SOCIETY, AND THOUGHT (ISSN 0890-6130). Published quar- terly in January, April, July, and October by MEP Publications, University of Minnesota, Physics Building, 116 Church Street S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455- 0112. Periodicals postage paid at Minneapolis, Minnesota. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to NST: Nature, Society, and Thought, University of Minnesota, Physics Building, 116 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455-0112. Subscriptions. Individuals, one year: U.S.A. $20, Canada and Mexico $31, other countries $45; two years: U.S.A. $35, Canada and Mexico $57, other countries $80. 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CONTENTS Vol. 19, No. 4 (2006) ARTICLES Erwin Marquit, Political and Economic Consequences of the Attempted Socialization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union 389 Lauren Raheja, Anxieties of Empire in Doyle’s Tales of Sherlock Holmes 417 Stratos Georgoulas, The Boy Scouts Association of Greece and Ecological Action as a Conservative Practice 427 Henri Houben, A Marxist Analysis of Present-Day Globalization 447 Hiroshi Ohnishi, A New Marxist Neoclassical Modeling of Capitalism 473 MARXIST FORUM 484 Memorandum on the Nandigram Situation 486 Chomsky and Other Intellectuals on Nandigram 491 Prabhat Patnaik, Three Decades of Left Front Rule in Bengal 492 BOOK REVIEW Michael Pozo, “Working through the Contradictions: From Cultural Theory to Critical Practice,” by E. San Juan Jr. 499 AUTHOR AND TITLE INDEX TO VOLUME 19 505 ABSTRACTS (in English and French) 510 Political and Economic Consequences of the Attempted Socialization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union Erwin Marquit Introduction The shift from a centrally planned socialist economy to a socialist-oriented market economy by China and Vietnam is viewed by some in the Communist movement as a partial retreat, made nec- essary by the demise of the Soviet Union and contemporary condi- tions of economic globalization, from the path of socialist develop- ment. Others even regard this shift as a complete abandonment of the socialist path due to dominance of rightist forces within specifi c Communist parties. Those who hold the latter view tend to view the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) as a history of struggle of the Left against the Right, with Lenin and Stalin being the standard bearers of the Left. In this view, Bukharin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev represent the rightist forces, advocat- ing increasing use of market forces, and ultimately opening the path for the counterrevolutionary overthrow of the socialist system. This view, with which I disagree, was clearly expressed in Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, published in 2004 by International Publishers (the publishing house associated with the Communist Party USA) in the interest of open discussion, although its views were not in line with those of the current CPUSA leadership. Nature, Society, and Thought, vol. 19, no. 4 (2006) 389 390 NATURE, SOCIETY, AND THOUGHT The course of my own thinking on this contentious history may be instructive. Publication of Socialism Betrayed by International Publishers led me reconsider my past hesitance to delve more deeply into this period of Soviet history. I had avoided works on the Soviet Union by anti-Soviet bourgeois scholars such as Robert Conquest. I had also been reluctant to read books by Soviet schol- ars such as Roy Medvedev,1 characterized as dissidents in Soviet times, since the accuracy of their information could not be verifi ed. Even Khrushchev’s memoirs seemed to me suspect, since he had publicly dissociated himself from them. (In this case, as increasing amounts of previously withheld archival material became available, Khrushchev’s authorship of the memoirs and the details of how they came to be published became part of the public record.) The cumulative effect of these historiographic developments led me to embark on an extensive review of this period of history. I wrote a critical review of the Keeran and Kenny book for Nature, Society, and Thought (2003). Keeran and Kenny’s rejoinder to this critique, as well as my response, were published the following year. I continued my exploration and incorporated the results in an article published in German with the title Politische und ökonomische Folgen der verfrühten Vergesellschaftung der Landwirtschaft in der Sowjetunion as a contribution to a Festschrift in honor of the philosopher Robert Steigerwald, a leading ideological fi gure in the German Communist Party (Marquit 2005). Except for an abridged version published by the Communist Review, a journal of the Communist Party of Britain, that article has not been published in English. For a single coherent account, I give here a slightly revised and expanded version of my article in the Steigerwald Festschrift, repeating some material from my published critique of Keeran and Kenny’s book and my subsequent exchange with them. Initial stages of transition from capitalism to socialism The shift to a socialist-oriented market economy (the term used by the Communist Party of Vietnam) may be considered not a retreat from socialism, but a necessary path toward the goal of a communist society. How do we explain, then, the fact that a somewhat similar, Premature Socialization of Agriculture in the USSR 391 but more limited, course was attempted in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and dropped? Was this abandonment premature? What were its consequences? Marx and Engels foresaw the transition from capitalism to the communist socioeconomic system as a relatively long process in the course of which the productive capacity of the society would grow to the point where the distribution would be on the basis of need and independent of the participation of individuals in the labor force. They made no effort to spell out the details of the transition process, apparently recognizing that such details would depend on how the revolutionary process would unfold under given levels of economic development. Marx did foresee, however, that during the initial phase of the transition from a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to a dictatorship of the proletariat, the distribution principle would be on the basis of the current bourgeois principle of distribution (bourgeois right). In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx described this as follows: The same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity- equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form. Hence equal right here is still in principle—bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at log- gerheads, while the exchange